August 2, 2009

The Parc National de la Vanoise is France’s oldest national park, and it lies in the département of Savoie, right on the border of France and Italy. Being part of the alps it’s full of amazing icy peaks, sheer rock faces, lakes, glaciers, and all sorts of wildlife. It is a stunning and rugged part of the world, and with its innumerable paths, scrambles, ski touring routes and dangerous climbs it is nothing short of a paradise for hikers, climbers, and lovers of mountains. I love rock climbing, but overseas I didn’t have any gear with me, so going to the Vanoise was primarily about hiking, looking for awesome wildlife, and of course taking photographs. Photographing mountains is a tricky business. Especially with snow around it’s can be hard to balance the exposure properly, and there are difficulties with choosing which lenses to take on a hike when you don’t want to lug too much gear up a giant hill. I have more pictures to post of wildlife and the Vanoise when the sun is out, but for today I will start with some shots of how it looks when the weather is more snowy.

At the start of my time overseas I hurt my foot by slipping on a stone staircase in the dark. After a few weeks it was getting worse so just before spending days hiking on it I finally saw a doctor in Switzerland – an experience that I expected to be horrible, but with what I now know is routine Swiss Efficiency I was seen to quickly, prescribed anti-inflammatory drugs and told to bathe my foot in water mixed with sea salt. Expecting some tablets and a small bag of salt I happily ventured off to the pharmacist, who, as though they were asked for salt every hour of every day, reached under the counter and handed me two kilograms of sea salt. Was I to bathe my foot every day for the next year? Could I also use the salt on picnics? This trip I tried to travel light, but I was still a nuisance to locals on trains who don’t want to have to deal with pack-wearing, camera-toting tourists, and particularly perhaps those that also have two kilos of poorly packaged salt on the seat across of them. In any case, the story ends happily because by the time I made it to the Vanoise, where I planned to use my foot whether or not it was ready, it was.. well, ready.

A perfect starting point for hikes is the little town of Pralognan la Vanoise, a happy village in one of the rare flat valleys between the enormous mountains. While not in the park itself, it’s within an hour’s easy walk of the park boundry. In Pralognan the mountains loom and there is a space in the air that only appears in alpine towns – an atmosphere of easily changable weather, ice on the wind even in summer, and a feeling of comparitive smallness that is not at all unpleasant. I am hooked on the place and am already plotting ways that it might be possible to return, preferably with a couple of weeks of spare time, a great telephoto lens, a trusty pair of boots, and absolutely no bags of salt.